The Adaptation of Sapphic Aesthetics and Themes in Verlaines Sappho Ballad - Literature Essay Samples

Several aspects of classical lesbian poet Sapphos work would come to be admired and built upon by the Decadent poets of the nearly two and a half millennia after her time. The mixing of gender aspects and themes of masculine power and feminine desire in To Anaktoria and Seizure nearly prefigured the radical combinations of worldly imagery and metaphysical meaning of Decadent worksin particular, Verlaines explicit homage, Sappho Ballad. In addition, Sapphos position as a classical lesbian poet made her an appealing ancestor to a genre so concerned with voiding social mores and finding unique ways to express a modern form of desire. Sappho Ballad heavily incorporated female homosexual love in its expression of male heterosexual love through its unique utilization of the language of lesbianism, a sexual orientation the Decadents felt was particularly appealing for its perceived purity and position outside the commonly accepted morality of society. Sapphos lyric poem To Anaktoria feature s many of the literary qualities that would come to define Decadent poetry. The work begins with a series of military images with a masculine aspect: cavalry, infantry, fleet of long oars, supreme sight, black earth. Thematically, this stanza almost resembles an epic poem, and the romantic quality of the poem is briefly subdued. This misleading aspect is mirrored by several Decadent works. Early Decadent Baudelaire deliberately masked dark themes and abrupt, depressing climaxes with innocuous, sweet openings to great effect. For example, A Carcass begins, Remember, my love, the object we saw / That beautiful morning in June, and then devolves into a long, explicit, and nearly surprising rumination of a rotting corpse.Baudelaires poem begins sweetly and ends gruesomely; To Anaktoria works in a reverse fashion, beginning with war imagery and moving towards a personal romantic message. Besides being an expression of Sapphos desire, the poem holds an implicit theme of the anticipation o f the triumph of love over war. Military imagery is used as an artifice to build a strong statement of love. This is comparable to several Decadent poems that use the language of military or imperial strength without expressing a military or historical narrative; e.g., Verlaines Languor, a contemplation of art and ennui that places the speaker as the Empire at the end of decadence. That Sappho as well fashioned love poems out of the language of masculinity and history indicates her concern for love above all things. The ultimate message of To Anaktoria is Sapphos willingness to forego the concreteness of dazzling chariots and armored hoplites for the less tangible soft step and radiant face of Anaktoria. Decadent literature at its base was also a repudiation of Realism and an escape into intangibles and the luxury of art e.g., Verlaines lazy acrostics.Seizure runs through a series of disturbing physical metaphors. Thin fire runs like a thief through her body, and she is paler than grass. She becomes intimate with dying, yet she cannot die, and must suffer everything. This convolution of metaphors is similar to the Symbolists own jungle of symbols. The dire hopelessness expressed by the final lines shares an emotion with Symbolists fascination with death and other realms, as well as the immortality of the poet. The end of Seizure seems to even imply that Sappho must live because of her poetry. Throughout Seizure, Sappho retains her control over language even while seeming to succumb to physical torment. Despite the poems brevity, it runs at a frantic, powerful pace; as the Decadents would later be concerned with sensation, Sappho expressed it here. Much like the Decadent poets, Sappho also used appealing allusions to express herself. She refers to the Iliad, yet focuses on the detail of the deleterious nature of Helens love for a man in order to describe Anaktorias own love, presumably also for a man. Interestingly, Sappho also seems to conflate Anaktoria with Anaktorias love. First, it is the one Anaktoria loves that is contrasted with the supreme sight of an army. Yet the conclusion of the poem contrasts a dazzling force with Anaktoria herself. Sappho winds her way through the poem to the expected conclusion of her love for Anaktoria, yet gets there by starting with Anaktorias beloved. A similar thing happens in Seizure. That man equals a god only because of his closeness to and effect on Sapphos own beloved. Although Sappho still explicitly expresses female homosexuality, she uses the powerful norm of heterosexuality to get to that point. Essentially, heterosexual desire stands in the way of her lesbian desire, and she uses that as a starting point to create both serious conflict and a sense of understanding in her lyric poems as she peers into the window of woman-man love. The empathy implied by Sappho calling Anaktorias heterosexual love the supreme sight in a love poem to Anaktoria herself is comparable to Decadent poets expressing heterosexual love through homosexual premises e.g., Verlaines Sappho Ballad. Verlaine and other Decadent poets harbored a contempt for social mores and empathized with alienation from society on account of ones deviant artistic expression. Lesbians were forced to turn their backs to society, and their form of exile was particularly fascinating. Sappho in particular was both a lesbian writer and poetic innovator. She expressed the misery of unrequited longing and social ostracism through her art. Her desires were difficult to fulfill due to classical morality; consequently, her writing took a sort of furtive aspect, as seen in the apparent entanglement of heterosexual and homosexual lust in some of her narratives, despite her clear desire for a female other. Furthermore, the erotic aspect of lesbian alienation was a serious point of interest to Decadent poets. Lesbians were seen as having sex solely for the sake of pleasure, a concept that both threatened the Christian morality and conventional male sexuality that Decadents disliked and, at the same time, mirrored the Decadent credo of art for the sake of art. Hence, Sapphic love was the purest form of the love and desire on which Decadent writers were fixated. In addition, lesbians were immune from male attraction. Lesbian Decadent writer Renee Vivien declared in that Sapphos songs enchanted the Sirens themselves, and that, symbolically, lesbians were eternally under the spell of the Past, i.e., Sapphic writings. The idea of this sort of lesbian immunity inspired a masochistic impulse among Decadent writers to find pleasure in denial. Verlaines Sappho Ballad' exemplifies this impulse. Sappho Ballad is a love poem imagining the eroticism between the speaker and the addressed female beloved. As in To Anaktoria, masculine language crops up as a point of contrast. Indeed, there is a sort of androgynous aspect to the speaker. His hand is gentle and a mistresss, yet hes like an animal whose wild head would wander and burrow. His body is an athletes and victory and defeat are knowing in a battle fought by heart and head. Yet the speaker insists hes like great Sappho. There is a subservient aspect to this. The speaker desires only to give pleasure to his beloved. She is complemented constantly throughout the poem: her skin is a festival, her body is splendour, she has a secret glory ripe with flavours. He experiences pleasure in a basic level i.e., pleasure for pleasures sake. His pleasure is merely pleasure: Such pleasure in your pleasure. His hand was meant to serve her. He wants to liberate her, even artistically: Let the soul of your poet roam / Where it will, fields woods hills / As you wish and as I so much want. Verlaine essentially tries to express his earnest desire to please a woman physically through the language of Sappho, whose lesbian love he considered to be the most truthful and equal to his own love. Through the poem, Verlaine insists that he is like great Sappho: that is, th at he can please a woman with the purity of lesbian love, and that he can liberate a womans artistic soul through his new arts skillful strokes. Yet the poem controverts this subtly with its references to masculinity. While Sappho used masculine language to draw a contrast between the ideal love of a woman and the more tangible love of a man, Verlaine seems to use it almost to remind the reader of his own masculinity and insist that a man can love a woman in the way that a woman can love a woman. The sensuality in Sappho Ballad is particularly tactile. His hand glides and is meant to serve her with skillful strokes; his wild head is sent to wander and burrow among the flavours of her secret glory; at last, his body is hard and soft again in battle. The poem moves with the frantic pace and emotion of Seizure, eliciting strong emotions with its fast, explicit language and powerful, erotic metaphors. Another way to read this is to note the apparently androgyny of the speaker, and how t he decidedly masculine language used to describe the speaker intermingles with comparisons between the speaker and Sappho and the speakers explicit desire to service a woman physically as a woman would. The androgyny of Verlaines speaker in Sappho Ballad is similar to the playful bisexuality expressed in several of Sapphos poems, including To Anaktoria, and Seizure, which begins with the misleading line, To me, that man equals a god. Of particular note is Verlaines line, To send it with a new arts skillful strokes. The heavy, Decadent sensuality of this poem is the art he mentions here, and he considers his own art as well as his aesthetic of pleasure to be that rapture-inducing new art. The idea that art itself could or should cause such physical pleasure is a strong Decadent ideal, one that contributed to the Decadents admiration of Sappho. Sappho herself was an artist of a new form who tried to express sensuality, desire, and the pain caused by both through her poetry. Her purp ose was not very distant from the purpose of the Decadents. Her own skillful strokes are being alluded to throughout Verlaines poem, just as her own lust is being used as a point of comparison for Verlaines male lust. By complementing the skill of his own new art and consequently comparing himself to Sappho, Verlaine syllogistically complements Sappho and praises her abilities to wield language as a force for luxury. Essentially, Sappho Ballad is not merely a love ballad to an unnamed object of desire, but also a ballad to Sappho herself. This poem would have a significantly reduced meaning if the lines referring to Sappho were excised. The allusion to Sappho is the cornerstone of the piece, one that invokes the ideal of lesbian desire as the strongest, purest desire, one that perfectly meshes with the Decadent aesthetic. Verlaine has taken Sapphic love and turned it into a nearly androgynous male lust to play the role of a gentle, yet libertine female lover, one who takes pleasure from the act of pleasuring another. This is how Sappho was updated: the female speaker morphed into a speaker who seems to straddle two genders and two sexual identities. One identity is decidedly masculine, as represented by the masculine symbolic language of the poem, while the other is decidedly feminine or more specifically, lesbian , as represented by the pleasure-from-pleasure aesthetic. Verlaine has seemingly taken the two conflicting personalities of To Anaktoria that is, the masculine military force, and the contrasting gentle femininity and morphed them into a new creature of Decadent literature.